LYSSARA
The most dangerous thing about surviving something terrible was that it made you think you knew what danger looked like. You started to believe you had developed a system that has calibrated instincts. Hard-won, tested, and reliable. You started to trust yourself the way only recently damaged people who trusted themselves, completely and slightly too quickly, and with the particular overconfidence of someone who had forgotten that the thing that nearly finished them also looked completely ordinary right up until it did not.
The man at the fire looked completely ordinary. That was the first thing I noticed and the first thing I did not trust. He did not stand when I stepped out of the tree line, and he did not reach for anything, and he did not perform the theatre of non-aggressio
